In psychology, there’s something called the JND* – the Just Noticeable Difference threshold. It’s when you notice that something is no longer the same as it was before. It’s just enough of a spray of perfume to catch a whiff of it in the air, and it’s the tiny drop of lemon juice in a glass of water to pick up on the taste. It’s when something crosses the line between as-it-was and changed. The JND threshold.
It’s set at 20% in many areas in marketing. For instance, if you increase the price of something by less than 20%, people will most likely keep buying it. If you decrease the size of a product by 18% instead of 22%, then customers won’t be as likely to notice. So our candy bars and rolls of toilet paper get slightly smaller, and the price steadily and incrementally increases. But at some point, we notice, we rebel. And it becomes unacceptable.
I was once interviewing a well-known singer, and I asked her about being real and taking off masks. She had shared openly about her addictions and how they had affected her life. She said that people only want a certain type of honesty and only want to hear about acceptable weaknesses. I had to stop and think about that.
I think she may have been right.
We want our leaders to show enough imperfection to identify with them, but not enough raw reality to shake them down off of a pedestal. We want our acquaintances to provide enough opportunities for philanthropy to soothe our conscience, but not so much to disturb our daily routines.
And I realized….it’s a JND threshold.
We have a line that we don’t really want people to cross and become too real…and become less tolerable.
And I wonder where that threshold is in accepting people. At what level of vulnerability and weakness do we move them from the category of acceptable to something we look down upon.
And I wonder what would happen if we didn’t have a Just Noticeable Difference line at all. That someone could open up and bare their soul and we not notice them any differently. That we would not react with a subconscious wince. That we would hug them just as fiercely.
If we saw the things they tucked away in private corners and chose to become a place of safety for them. If we publicly encouraged more than we publicly ostracized.
I think that might be quite a thing to see.
I don’t know what my JND line is with other people. I think it’s been a number way too low for way too long.
And I think I’d like to change that.
*the jnd is the “smallest detectable difference” or “the minimum level of stimulation that a person can detect 50-percent of the time.”
Kinda is an author, teacher, speaker, entrepreneur, and hopeless wanderer. Her favorite places in the world include Manarola, Italy, and Gimmelwald, Switzerland. In her free time, you can find her bargain shopping and hanging out at coffee shops.
I found this out when I began telling people how God had helped me walk free from controlling fears. .. I Thought everyone would be as happy as I was! Instead they became scared. Lol. . So the story is still in the making. . And only told in bite size clips. . In certain settingd.
Great read! This is new info to me. I love to learn new things in blogs, not just hearing the same things repeated in all blogs. Keep it up